Don't recall the name Chuq, but read and posted in the Usenet groups including the various Mac ones for years before finding the original dealmac site. Kept up with them until the usenet feed was shut off here at the university about 10 years ago. Tried keeping up with a few groups through google, but their interface was unwieldy and has not gotten any better in the years since.

When I was in college I read various usenet groups every day. I remember the outcry when AOL granted access to usenet. Over time people migrated from usenet to web forums. Are there any active discussions happening on usenet? I thought it had become a place for downloading porn, movies and pirated software.

I like it too. It has extraordinarily powerful filtering capabilities. You can even use regular expressions in your filters. Nothing else comes close to MT-Newswatcher when it comes to filtering. Unfortunately, I don't think you can use NZBs with it, and you can't do batch uploads with it.

I have been using Thunderbird as a news reader. It works, but.
* it has a wonky, undocumented keyboard interface
* it balances the lack of key UI with 2- and 3-level menu picks
* there does not appear to be a way to bind keys to frequently used menu action items
* message saving is bizarre at best.
* every saved message ends in .eml (WTF? whatever happened to .txt?).
* each message in a thread of discussion is saved as a separate file..concatenation is not an option.

Gravity, for Windows something-or-other, is unsupported, but has an interface that is closest to the news readers of old (late 70's, early 80's), and does not sport Mozilla's 'we do it all for you in our inimitable fashion, whether you like it or not, so there' attitude.

The apps discussed above are centered more on downloading from the bin.* binaries hierarchy rather than participating in topic discussions.

There are some active corners of the Usenet even now, 40+ years on, but there are also a lot of moribund newsgroups still listed with no one, not even crickets, chirping. The active ones I like to follow are

Free signup Usenet servers at nntp.aioe.org and news.eternal-september.org have the full forest of news trees, reasonably fast download, and seem to be always available.

I think the reason I like to hang out here at MRF is that it is as stunningly broad in the range of topics discussed (and in the generally high quality of the information presented) as any subset of the Usenet, then or now.

Quoteeustacetilley
" The market for a Usenet client in 2014 isn’t exactly huge."

Usenet was never supposed to be a commercial "market". Very much the opposite. There are still ways around these jerks.
Let's hear it for the "specialized toolz".

I wonder if any here made it all the way from comp.sys.mac, to dealmac, and then to MRF unscathed.

Does anybody else here remember Chuq?

¬Eustace

A. What specialized tools?
B. Wouldn't that reveal your age?

hahaha

Some are specialized indeed, and need quite a toolshop.
If you have access to a Remote Shell account on a system that provides Netnews, you just need Telnet, available stock in the OSX Terminal, or one of the various third party Desktop versions.
That's what I did for many years.

You can download and compile tin, an open-source threaded Newsreader, in the Terminal, and access direct Netnews feeds that way.

Two feeds mentioned above, news.eternal-september.org, and nntp.aioe.org, appear to be down.

Google Groups is pretty bad, but it does provide some access, if you know your way around. I see that comp.sys.apollo hasn't had a relevant post since last year.

Astound killed their nntp server a couple of years ago; some ISPs still have them, but they may not necessarily publicize the fact. Do a traceroute on nntp.yourisp.com, and see what happens.

I will not, out of principle, pay a dime extra for USENET access. I didn't get a dime for all that I contributed early on, and rarely did anybody else. (I wrote some User Guides and worked on a couple of commitees. I can't remember exact dates, 1981-1991 is still fuzzy, (Owlshift...), but I was using a Sun 2/50 at the time.)
(I also pushed hard for rec.humor.objectivism, but some people had no sense of humor.)

¬Eustace
(Edited- I forgot to mention that I was never interested in the Binaries Newsgroups. Some people are, and perhaps for them the Commercial alternatives are appropriate.)

It's the only reason I bought Parallels... so I could run a VM of Snow Leopard so I can still run MT-Newswatcher. I really wish Simon Fraser wouldn't have abandoned it. The only problem I have with it is the ridiculous limit of 100,000 headers at a time. Some groups get over a million headers a day, and if you don't keep up with it, it can take hours just to go through the headers.

I have been using a trial version of Unison for NZBs. Guess I can get a non-trial version now. I've also used Pan running under X11. I haven't been able to get it to work under Mavericks yet though. It's decent, and can do NZBs.

Quoterz
It's the only reason I bought Parallels... so I could run a VM of Snow Leopard so I can still run MT-Newswatcher. I really wish Simon Fraser wouldn't have abandoned it. The only problem I have with it is the ridiculous limit of 100,000 headers at a time. Some groups get over a million headers a day, and if you don't keep up with it, it can take hours just to go through the headers.

Thoth can handle hundreds of thousands of headers. It also springs from Norstad's Newswatcher tree, so the capability is there.

The only problem is that the developer can be described as, at best, eccentric, at worst, psychotic, often wavering between the two.

But it, too, has ceased development (at least for now), and there's no way to obtain new licenses.

Quoterz
It's the only reason I bought Parallels... so I could run a VM of Snow Leopard so I can still run MT-Newswatcher. I really wish Simon Fraser wouldn't have abandoned it. The only problem I have with it is the ridiculous limit of 100,000 headers at a time. Some groups get over a million headers a day, and if you don't keep up with it, it can take hours just to go through the headers.

Thoth can handle hundreds of thousands of headers. It also springs from Norstad's Newswatcher tree, so the capability is there.

The only problem is that the developer can be described as, at best, eccentric, at worst, psychotic, often wavering between the two.

But it, too, has ceased development (at least for now), and there's no way to obtain new licenses.

I tried Thoth. Basically a blatent ripoff of MT-Newswatcher. The guy took free code, made some changes, then charged for it. And yes, the "developer" Brian is/was a bit of a nut case. I tried to buy a license once and encountered outright hostility from him. He was upset that his software, which many were using to download "warez" was having its serial number put out there. This was during one of his many periods where he was refusing to sell it anymore. After that, I basically said eff him, even when he relented and started selling it again.

Unison really tried to make usenet "user friendly". But it was a hopeless task. What programs like MT-Newswatcher and Thoth lack in user friendliness, they more than make up for in power and flexibility. If Unison would run into missing parts, many times it would throw an error, and you're SOL. Using MT-Newswatcher on the same site (I use Astraweb, BTW), I can almost always manually resurrect the files.

I figure some day, it just won't be workable to run these programs anymore. I've run Pan on Ubuntu, so that's always an option. Or I'll have to spring for a copy of Windows and run Forte' in a VM. PC users swear by that program.

For binaries, there's no real need for a reader anymore, between the indexing sites and nzb clients. Even the free ones are pretty powerful, can handle multiple servers, and make it a seamless process.

QuoteJoeH
Don't recall the name Chuq, but read and posted in the Usenet groups including the various Mac ones for years before finding the original dealmac site. Kept up with them until the usenet feed was shut off here at the university about 10 years ago. Tried keeping up with a few groups through google, but their interface was unwieldy and has not gotten any better in the years since.

Me to- I mean, I agree with this pretty much word-for-word. I learned a lot of useful stuff in the comp.sys.mac.* groups, and some stuff I wish I could unlearn in the alt.* groups. In 1998, I went to a Chicago alt.folklore.urban Halloween party and met a bunch of people I'd only known from their typing. It was pretty much my apotheosis of nerd-dom, and a terrific time.